6 gut checks before the stock market’s opening bell

By Shawn Langlois

We might not hit 36,000 on the Dow any time soon — or sprout fairy wings and square dance with unicorns — but it looks like a done deal that we’ll take out another record high today.

Of course, a sickly jobs tally might have changed all that. But that didn’t happen. Not even close

Ahead of the report, the CrackedMarket blog said bulls needn’t worry either way. “If we have a disappointing number, we might dip, but expect traders to find a silver lining in the report and buy the dip,” the author wrote. “That is what they did with negative GDP, and is what they will likely do with a disappointing employment report.”

In other words, when investors are hell-bent on buying, as they sure seem to be of late, they have an uncanny knack for ignoring the downers, like Dr. Doom, and reading screaming buy signals into even the most bearish developments.

Today, they don’t need to read anything into the surprisingly strong report.

The economy: The hotly anticipated jobs report hit at 8:30 a.m. Eastern, and economists surveyed by MarketWatch had expected to see that the U.S. gained 160,000 jobs in February. They got 236,000. The unemployment rate was pegged to hold steady at 7.9%. It fell to 7.7%. Later in the day, the government is expected to report that wholesale inventories increased 0.3% in January after an unexpected decline in December. Read: Friday spotlight on economy.

The chart of the day: This whole record-high celebration is a bit more exclusive than the impression you might get from all these headlines. Here’s a Bank of America Merrill Lynch chart (h/t Zero Hedge) that shows just how many asset classes are being left out. And how far they are from their respective peaks.

The call of the day: The infamous “Dow 36,000!” call drew jeers, even from the frothy bulls, when it was first trotted out more than a decade ago, and it did so once again when James Glassman revisited the target yesterday afternoon.

The backlash, just like the first time, was swift and biting. The Curmudgeon’s Attic blog says “Financial Armageddon will have destroyed the U.S. economic system before Dow 36,000 becomes even a nominal reality.” Eddy Elfenbein of the Crossing Wall Street blog reiterated his reaction from way back when, pulling no punches with his claim that Glassman’s book “contains egregious errors and fallacious reasoning.”

Cullen Roche of Pragmatic Capitalism didn’t exactly agree with Glassman, but in his post, “Nikkei 13,000? Why not 36,000?” he wrote: “A 150% rally in the Dow seems a bit over the top, but who knows anymore? After all, what we’re seeing in Japan is (at least temporarily) throwing conventional wisdom entirely out of the window.

Random reads: Middle America at its finest. Applebee’s patron gets popped when she uses a fake ID to buy booze. Dumb: She hands the server the server’s stolen ID. Dumber: She’s 26 and old enough to use her own ID.

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Need to Know (NTK) guides investors to the most important, insightful items required to chart a course ahead of each trading day. Anchored by lead writer Shawn Langlois, NTK will sift through the fire hose of news, commentary and data, from traditional and non-traditional sources, and extract what’s most essential. You can start reading NTK here as it begins publishing at approximately 6:30 a.m. ET, or sign up here to get a version in your email box every morning at approximately 8:45. a.m. ET.